She tracks billions for Michigan recovery

While Leslee Fritz spent an exhausting Thursday, Feb. 12, in Lansing working with state legislators on the latest, worsening budget projections, Congress in Washington was completing passage of a massive bill intended to jump-start the national economy out of its long recession.

Early the next morning, a Friday the 13th as it happened, Friz got a call from the boss, Gov. Jennifer Granholm, about a job that needed doing. Would Fritz become "the point person for the state to make sure that al the opportunities of the Recovery Act are being dealt with?" she recalled the governor asking.

"She said we need somebody to make sure we do this right."

Fritz, 36, has been trying since to do just that, directing a new Economic Recovery Office with a staff of eight people mostly borrowed from other state agencies and a three-year budget of $2 million. That's not much compared to all the billions Fritz is supposed to account for.

In an interview Tuesday in Lansing, Fritz admitted the job is not what she expected, although nobody, probably even in Washington, knew all that was in the $789 billion federal spending bill that President Barack Obama hustled through Congress in less than a month on the job.

Fritz admits she briefly entertained some visions of being a Santa Claus type, doling out bags of money for worthwhile projects in distressed communities.

Instead, she spends a lot of time understanding and explaining all the strings attached to the various sources of the federal money and telling people, communities and organizations which of some 110 spigots might be best to tap.

The states, she said, have relatively little discretion about doling out the federal dollars.

Michigan has received just over $5 billion as of this week, the biggest piece of which is going to schools to offset as much as possible cuts in state aid because of declining tax revenues.

Another big chunk is going toward providing health care through Medicaid for the 16,000 additional people who are joining the program each month as they lose jobs with benefits.

In short, a lot of this so-called "stimulus" money has become maintenance funds for education and a safety net that has more and more people to catch as unemployment climbs past 14%.

Fritz says she has had countless conversations with people who say, "I have an idea" or "I have a business plan" or "I have a real problem" and want to know where they can get "some of that stimulus money."

Would that it were so easy.

"There is money for emergency needs, Medicaid, food stamps, job training, and from specific accounts for very specific projects," she said. But the state is not writing checks from a federal bank account.

Money for some big-ticket items, such as an information technology system for health care, advanced battery manufacturing and the expansion of broad-band Internet access, has yet to be awarded. In those cases, she said, Michigan will join with and help coordinate pitches to Washington from public-private partnerships.

But there will be intense competition for the funds and it's not the state that will be selecting the winners.

The extent to which the federal government is controlling this money is perhaps best illustrated by a recent missive from Washington. Fritz said the guidelines for completing one report on how the money is being used covered 85 pages. Just the guidelines!

And, Michigan is among 16 states where federal auditors visit for two weeks of every month to keep a running track of spending and results under the Recovery Act.

Clearly, Obama not only wants this to work but also hopes to avoid some politically embarrassing disclosure a year from now about Recovery Act funds being squandered or stolen. Clearly, too, he hopes this massive outflow of tax dollars will have the economy well in recovery by 2012, when the voters will decide whether it was worth it.

And with this as his signature domestic undertaking, Obama has seen to it that the funds are targeted to the priorities of his administration: Meeting emergency needs, easing dependence on foreign oil, improving education and revamping health care. Michigan can't quibble with any of those. Fritz and her crew have to figure out how the state fits into them.

In terms of pure economic development - capital for start-ups, loans for expansions, etc. - "there's a little and we're trying to figure out how to get all we can," she said. Fritz added that the Recovery Act also gave a number of Obama cabinet members multi-billion-dollar pots of money for discretionary projects that may have national implications. But there again, it's not the states making the calls.

Before taking her current post, Albion College graduate Fritz was a senior project manager and deputy communications director for Granholm and communications director for the Office of the State budget.

In short, communicating is what she does. And these days, she's communicating that last Friday the 13th was not the Christmas for Michigan that many people may have been expecting with passage of the Recovery Act. Still, she said, the federal money coming into Michigan already has prevented a bad situation from becoming utterly catastrophic for a lot of families. And there will, she said, be groundwork well-laid in the next year or so for important infrastructure projects such as high-speed rail between Ann Arbor and Detroit and expanded broad-band.

"We will go after every opportunity," Fritz said. "But nobody should be sitting around waiting for us to hand them a check."

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She tracks billions for Michigan recovery

While Leslee Fritz spent an exhausting Thursday, Feb. 12, in Lansing working with state legislators on the latest, worsening budget projections, Congress in Washington was completing passage of a